Thursday, December 3, 2015

Homophones: Possessive Pronouns vs. Contractions

Are you studying English? Then you have come to the right
place... the internet! But... have you ever noticed: the internet has some
mistakes!

Welcome to Correcting the Internet. I'm Mrs. Teacher.

In my last video, I talked about simple past tense. Let's look
at a good example of simple past tense sentences from my number-one original
fan, Heather! She has used simple past tense verbs to talk about our sordid
past. Well done, Heather!

Today's topic is homophones.

No, not homo-phobes, HOMOPHONES.

The Greek prefix "homo" means
"same" and "phono" means "sound." Homophones are
words that sound the same, but have different meanings and etymologies.

Mixed-up homophones is pretty much the biggest problem on
the internet today.

Let's look at its vs it's.

The first is a possessive
pronoun. It doesn't have an apostrophe.

Other possessive pronouns include her, his, their, our,
your... you get it, right? Any apostrophes in those words? NOPE.

So when "its" is a possessive pronoun, as in

"here's a monkey and its banana,"

it is spelled without an
apostrophe.

So what about "it's"? It's a contraction. See what
I did there?

A contraction has an apostrophe to indicate that a letter or
a few letters are missing. Other contractions include she's, he's, you're,
they're, can't, and shouldn't.

It's is actually two words: itand is. When we talk
we're lazy so we reduce "it is" to "it's" and we spell this
with an apostrophe to show that the letter 'i' is missing.

'It's' can also be a contraction for the two words, "it
has": It's been a busy day for your friendly neighbourhood apostrophe!

You shouldn't mix up its and it's.

*your

The internet's favourite homophone is probably yourvs. you're. Now that we've talked about possessive pronouns and contractions,
you should get the difference.

*your

One of these words is a possessive pronoun, and the other is
a contraction for the two words 'you' and 'are.'

If you're not sure which your
to use in your sentence, you can try substituting the words 'you are.'

So this is correct: "You're a great teacher,"
because you could say "You are a great teacher."

But this: "Your a moron," isn't. You ought to say,
"You are a moron," so what do we need to use in this sentence? A
contraction!

So that brings us to today's sentence challenge:

Choose a pair of homophones.

Write me two sentences in the comments below, one for each
homophone.

If you write two correct sentences, I'll share your
awesomeness in an upcoming video!

But be careful... if you write something silly, I will make
fun of you.